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<\/a><\/p>\nClowns used the paddle controllers to bounce your player up in the air and pop balloons at the top of your screen. It got faster the longer you played, but I NEVER really enjoyed it. It did have a 2 player mode, which meant I could school all of my friends on it.<\/p>\n
Those 2 games, despite the fact that they are both universally panned, opened gaming up to me. I HAD GAMES IN MY HOUSE! And I could play them as long as I wanted. (within reason\u2026thanks mom.) However, around the same time I got my kick ass VIC-20, my neighbor got himself Nintendo.<\/p>\n
And my world was rocked. 8K of RAM! More than 16 colors! And a whole slew of games (there were rumors of at least 50!) and the games themselves were amazing. RC Pro Am, ExciteBike, Zelda and Mario. Games that made GORF look like a steaming pile of puke.<\/p>\n
(the whole saving game things still blows my mind, even today, knowing that they had to put a battery inside the cart for Zelda in order to keep the tiny bit of memory the cart held charged. I\u2019m mostly impressed the NES itself didn\u2019t save the games\u2026the games saved themselves. It\u2019s a really, really smart work around to prevent people from having to buy some peripheral to save games).<\/p>\n
After years of being the only person I knew who had a VIC-20 was the fact that SO MANY PEOPLE HAD AN NES! I could play games at Stefan\u2019s house, then go to Dan\u2019s house, or Murphy\u2019s house. And people could trade games! I remember watching a kid trade Zelda for ExciteBike for a weekend and having my mind blown. (People can do that? REALLY?)<\/p>\n
I knew I had to have one.<\/p>\n
So I saved my allowance, did some chores, stole change from my parents and finally saved enough for maybe half of one. And my folks paid for the rest. I think we bought it at Sears at West County Mall. I can remember driving home with it. Holding it on my lap like it was made of gold and\/or eggs. Starting it up, and playing Arch Rivals, a basketball game that also let you punch the other players to steal the ball.<\/p>\n
It was amazing. (I\u2019m sure it wasn’t really). I guess I\u2019ll find out again.<\/p>\n
Because that\u2019s what I\u2019m going to do here, among other things. I\u2019ll write about the games, I\u2019ll write about what\u2019s going on in my head (it\u2019s an election year and ALL of the candidates are fucking horrible) and if I get motivated, I may post my book episodically (which is a word Bill Gates recognizes, strangely enough).<\/p>\n
Some of the games I\u2019m really excited about. Others, not so much. I\u2019m curious to see if Battletoads is as hard as I remember, or if the Muppets game is as bad as everyone says.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll throw in some history of the games as I go. I\u2019ll talk about the games I remember, and the games I think are amazing, and the games I think are horrible.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m very curious to see how some of the games have aged\u2026I\u2019m betting most of them haven\u2019t aged well.<\/p>\n
And a quick note on how I\u2019m going to play them\u2026I have SOME original carts and a working NES. I\u2019ll play those games when they come up in order on the NES. For the others, I\u2019m going to have to emulate the games. To that end, I\u2019m working on a Raspberry Pi emulation station, and my NES usb controller shows up from Amazon tomorrow. (I\u2019ll do a post on that too) I\u2019m doing my best to play the games as close to the original as possible, without breaking the bank. Finally, I can\u2019t play the games with the light gun. I don\u2019t have a TV that\u2019s compatible, and I\u2019m certainly not going to pay for a CRT TV and a way to push from my computer or Pi to make it work. I\u2019ll figure something out for those games.<\/p>\n
There it is. The first of many posts regarding the glory of video games. Now to figure out how to post a blog on my website.<\/p>\n
Here goes nothing.<\/p>\n
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* I will write a post about Doug at some point\u2026he\u2019s had more than enough of an effect on my life for that\u2026I realized that when I was talking about him with child #1 over Christmas<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So here\u2019s the deal. I need something to write about. Teresa is convinced that I\u2019ve got a book in me somewhere (Alice and the Mendoza Line will happen eventually) (I realize that Alice and the Mendoza Line is a horrible title) (maybe it isn\u2019t?). Every single piece of advice I\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjj4.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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